Designing a wealth of engaging content marks your way to a successful marketing strategy. There is no dearth of creative ideas, but how do we actually distinguish between engaging & non-engaging content; could be an intimidating task!
The content strategies for any business or brand should be versatile and adaptable in order to meet the ever-evolving needs of consumers across the globe. The best way to make the task easier is to track your content through marketing metrics relevant to your business. It will help you find, how well your content is doing on digital platforms.
Also, analysing the content marketing metrics will guide you on how to tweak your content strategy for an effective lead generation. An apt content strategy affects your sales & conversions positively & promptly, if your target audience doesn’t find the content of their interest then all the efforts will go in vain. So, these metrics will act as the pillars of your content construction and if the pillars are strong the building gets a strong foundation.
Before we move on to the content marketing metrics, we need to track this year; let’s have a look at the content marketing metrics framework.
Content Marketing Metrics: A Short Introduction
Content marketing metrics help you to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Evidently, the digital content marketing has come a long way in the past few years. The consumer’s preferences and interests have evolved a lot and it is essential for the marketers to keep a constant check to be updated all the time.
To start off, let’s have a look at this inverted pyramid model proposed by Jay Baer in his eBook on content marketing metrics. The various content marketing metrics present in the model can answer most of the content marketing strategy questions.
• Consumption Metrics: How many people are consuming your content? Which channels are they using? How frequently and how in-depth is their consumption?
• Sharing Metrics: Which content pieces are being shared? Who is sharing them? How/where are they sharing? How often are they being shared?
• Lead Metrics: How is content supporting demand generation in terms of lead generation and lead nurturing (middle-of-the-funnel)?
• Sales Metrics: How is your content influencing bottom-of-the-funnel results? How is your content filling the pipeline? How is your content driving revenue?
In addition to above mentioned metrics, some more content marketing metrics should be taken into consideration as they could provide more detail and clarity about the ROI of your content marketing strategy.
• Retention (Subscription) Metrics: How effectively can you hold your consumer’s interests?
• Engagement Metrics: What kind of content, either inspire or attract consumers to initiate an action? How frequently they are responding?
• Cost Metrics: In order to determine your ROI, you need to check your overall content marketing cost, investment of time and cost per resource.
These content marketing metrics can be measured across various digital content channels such as social media platforms, blogs, emails, websites e.tc. A standard framework map is given below to give you a better idea of how to measure the content marketing across different digital channels.
Now, that we have a decent idea about content marketing metrics; here are 3 most useful content marketing metrics you need to track for an effective content marketing strategy:-
• Reach Of Your Content: The extent of your content can be identified by looking at the numbers of shares, conversations and the mentions about the content/ brand. This will give you a clear idea of who your consumers are and how frequent & far they are sharing/ consuming your content.
PS*- If your content is interesting then your audience will themselves market it for you adding the credibility factor to it.
• Traffic: The traffic is the most obvious metric which will give you a fair idea of how well your content is performing online. The fluctuations in the traffic will help you identify the most in-demand content. Analyse the responses and you can observe an emerging pattern telling you about what to post and what not!
• Feedback/ Response: Looking at the feedback/ responses, you will get to know what kind of stuff you need to be pushed to create active and engaged conversations.
Written by Siddharth Khanna, Founder & CEO Brand Visage Communication